It was the photo that touched Britain, a Jewish woman and a Muslim man united in grief. The story of their 10-year friendship will restore your faith in humanity
ARRIVING arm-in-arm at Albert Square in Manchester, all they wanted was to quietly pay their respects to the 22 innocents slaughtered by suicide bomber Salman Abedi.
They only intended to stay ten minutes, long enough to say a prayer and add their bouquet of purple flowers to the sea of floral tributes before leaving unnoticed.
But, overwhelmed with emotion, 93-year-old Renee Black felt her legs give way and her companion Sadiq Patel, 46, quickly unfolded a portable chair and helped her sit down.
Renee’s face crumpled as she wept for the children, teens and parents killed or injured in the blast as they left an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on Monday night.
One in particular broke her heart: eight-year-old Saffie Roussos, who was the youngest of the victims. Renee turned to Sadiq, crying: ‘I’m 93. I’ve lived my whole life and that girl has had no life whatsoever.’ Sadiq knelt by Renee’s side and gently placed a comforting hand on her arm, before covering his face with both hands as he, too, broke down in tears.
By the time they left Albert Square two hours later, these two unlikely friends were being held as the unwitting symbol of hope and unity as moving images of them comforting each other went global.
For Renee Black is Jewish. She observes the Sabbath, wears a gold Star of David around her neck, eats only Kosher food and every year remembers the victims of the Holocaust.
Sadiq Patel, 46, is a practising Muslim, and dresses from head to toe in Islamic robes. Married to a local girl, with whom he has two children, he has memorised all 6,600 verses, 30 volumes and 114 chapters of the Koran.
Both were born and bred in Blackburn, Lancashire, one of the most deprived and racially segregated areas in Britain. Yet, for more than ten years Renee and Sadiq have been the firmest of friends, both members of The Interfaith Forum, a voluntary group devoted to promoting harmony between different faiths and ethnic communities.
‘When I look at Sadiq, I don’t see a Muslim and when he looks at me he doesn’t see a Jew. He is one of my dearest and most caring friends. I don’t know what I’d do without him,’ says Renee.
‘When we were walking through Albert Square I kept asking Sadiq: “Why is everyone looking at us?” I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about us being there together. All I could think about was that poor little eight-year-old girl. God’s been good to me. I am at the edge of life now, while hers should have been spread out before her.
‘I was rather upset and Sadiq tried to pacify me. I said a little prayer for Saffie and Sadiq said “Amen”. We both wanted to pay our respects. There are no differences between us.’ And when Sadiq takes up the story, you realise Renee is absolutely right. There isn’t. His grief and shock is raw and palpable: ‘When I heard the news about the atrocity on Monday night, I turned on the TV and I was so devastated I couldn’t sleep, thinking: “How could anyone do this?” ’ he says.
‘I have two daughters. They are 14 and 18. I’ve dropped them off at public places and picked them up later and I felt such grief for those parents whose children will never come home again.
‘It was heart-wrenching, my stomach just churned and churned. It was beyond my comprehension. The Koran does not teach this. These terrorists may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but it is not the Islam I know. Islam means peace.
‘The next morning I heard 19 people were dead, then 21, then 22. It was appalling to think someone had deliberately targeted young people at a pop concert.’
Although they’ve known each other for a decade, ever since Renee’s long-term partner Harry died three years ago, and she suffered two mini-strokes, affecting her mobility, Sadiq has become her lifeline and prop.
He visits every four days, and drives her into Manchester to stock up on Kosher food.
On Wednesday morning, after the bombing, Sadiq asked Renee if she would join him to pay their respects in Albert Square, on their way to the shops. He picked up the bouquet in Blackburn, and they arrived in Manchester by 10.30 but they spent what felt like ages driving in circles as roads were blocked off and cars diverted.
‘We almost didn’t make it and nearly gave up. We were driving left, right and left again, but we turned a corner and the town hall was in front of us,’ says Sadiq.
‘I squeezed the car onto the pavement between two BBC vans, hoping we wouldn’t get a ticket, while we spent ten minutes laying our flowers and saying a prayer.
‘As a Muslim, I felt quite nervous about going to Albert Square. You are never sure how people might react to you, because these radicalised terrorists have tarnished the Islam faith.
‘I was worried we might attract attention, but I was surprised by how much. The atmosphere was so sombre and quiet and we both felt very emotional. Renee was really upset thinking about the poor children who died.
‘For both us it felt incomprehensible that someone could take all those innocent lives in the name of faith. It’s certainly not a faith either of us recognises.’
Their display of interfaith harmony, tolerance, compassion and defiant celebration of what unites people — rather than divides them — quickly went viral, travelling the world via international news networks.
Both have been hurt by the speculation since that their appearance together at Albert Square was somehow ‘staged’ for the cameras.
Sitting side by side in Renee’s home, the friendship between the pair is evident. A feisty, independent, house-proud Renee — who has no children — treats Sadiq like a much loved, surrogate son.
Likewise, he fusses over her, offering a guiding hand when she loses her balance getting up from her chair and making sure her walking stick is close to hand, calming her down when she gets into a tizz. Both speak with the same Lancashire accent.
Blackburn was an almost exclusively white working-class town when Renee was born in 1924. Her mother Bessie was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant Isaac Cohen, a joiner, who married a British wife called Jane.
Renee’s Jewish father, Eli Black, who died in 1951, was originally from Lithuania. She does not know the name he arrived with, on his own in Britain at the age of eight, nor the circumstances. He never spoke of it.
There used to be a synagogue in
‘We like to see people’s similarities rather than differences of faith’
‘There is tension when people do not integrate’
Blackburn years ago and a small but thriving Jewish community, but both are now gone. As far as Renee is aware, she is the only Jewish person left in the town.
Perhaps it was her own small experience of anti-Semitism when she was growing up, added to the horror of the Holocaust, which has shaped Renee into the kind of person who seeks similarities between people rather than differences. ‘There were a couple of incidents at school and once in a cafe, when offensive things were said about Jews, but I am not the kind of person to take umbrage easily,’ says Renee.
For 38 years, she worked at Blackburn College, first as a clerk and then as assistant to the principal. ‘I was 15 when World War II started and I remember being horrified when we learned of the gas chambers and death camps.
‘I have always felt I owe something to the millions of Jews who were murdered, to make a stand against hatred.
‘When I started work at Blackburn College, I was put in charge of overseas students who came from Nigeria, India, Pakistan and China. They called me Mum.’ When Renee moved with her widowed mother into her terraced home in 1964, it was a predominantly white area. Now it is predominantly Asian — Sadiq lives three minutes round the corner.
The year before last, Renee tried moving into a warden assisted flat in the more upmarket Lytham St Annes — to be closer to a synagogue — but missed Blackburn and her Asian neighbours so much she moved back after six months.
‘When the Asians first started moving in, the whites started to move out, but I stayed because I like it here,’ she says. ‘No one talked to me in Lytham, but here my neighbours are always talking to me, they care about me and check that I am all right.’
Sadiq Patel’s family were among those who arrived in Britain from India in the Sixties, attracted by jobs in the cotton manufacturing factories and the chance of a better life. Sadiq was born in Blackburn in 1971 and married his British-born Indian wife in 1996.
Sadiq’s father, a headteacher back in India, worked as an interpreter at a register officer and his parents believed in trying to integrate with the local community.
He went to the local primary school, then the secondary school — which was predominantly white — for two years before spending the next five years at an Islamic boarding school in Yorkshire. It took him three years to learn the Koran, from cover to cover.
‘I was aware of racism, but I cannot say I suffered from it directly. I was one of only two Asians who played on a football team and people would say things like: “I can’t stand those P***s, but you’re all right.” I was accepted because they knew me as a person and liked me.
‘When people can relate to each other as humans, we can see our similarities, rather than the differences in colour or faith.’
Sadiq believes in integration, but he accepts he cannot ignore the fact not everyone shares his views. Blackburn has changed over the years and the tensions that have emerged fuel more strongly his determination to build stronger links between different faiths and communities.
‘We have a population of 140,000 with just over 40,000 ethnic minorities, predominently Muslims of Indian or Pakistani heritage. We have a few hundred Hindus and a couple of hundred Sikhs,’ says Sadiq, who is a school governor and works for the community voluntary sector.
‘We have very dense populations of ethnic minorities and the highest proportion of mosques in proportion to the population. We have faith schools and Islamic boarding schools, and there are tensions when people do not integrate and the area becomes targeted by Far-Right groups.’
Two obvious examples of this are easy to find. Saajid Badat, a co-conspirator of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and serving a 13-year prison sentence for plotting to blow up an aeroplane, studied in Blackburn. In 2010, two Muslim brothers who dubbed themselves ‘The Blackburn Resistance’ were jailed for terrorism offences.
Both Sadiq and Renee have seen the social mix of their home town shift immeasurably over the years. ‘When I moved into this district, I was one of the few Asian people, now Renee is one of the only white people left, but we have so many similarities in life within all faiths,’ says Sadiq.
‘It’s unusual for a Muslim man in a robe with a hat and beard and a Jewish lady to be friends, but let’s celebrate what we have in common with a vengeance. We all share the same things births, marriage and deaths, so let’s reflect and tolerate each other’s differences.’
Sadiq was the only Muslim at the funeral of Renee’s Jewish partner Harry when he died three years ago and, likewise, Renee was the only white woman at the funeral of Sadiq’s mother Amina last year.
She remembers: ‘There were hundreds of men there. I was the only woman and the only white person, but everyone made me feel welcome and spoke to me.’
Sadiq, meanwhile, says he was ‘humbled’ by the fact Renee broke the Sabbath (Saturdays are traditionally days of rest and religious contemplation) to attend his mother’s funeral. ‘That was iconic for me,’ says Sadiq. ‘Renee has never broken the Sabbath for one day in her life.
‘I love Blackburn. There is nowhere I’d rather live. I have brought up my daughters to integrate into British society, just as I have. As Muslims, I ask them to dress modestly and respectfully, but it is up to them if they choose to wear the scarf or listen to pop music.
‘Would I have let them go to the Ariana Grande concert? If they had wanted to, yes. I, too, could have been among those grieving parents and I share their grief.
‘I don’t know what turns a young Muslim into a radicalised extremist or a terrorist. It is something I cannot comprehend and every time they commit an atrocity I think: “No, no, not again.” It is not the Islam I know and each time I work harder for harmony, going out building connections between churches and mosques.
‘After Monday’s bombing, I just had to pay my respects to those innocent victims as a Muslim and as a fellow human being. With our flowers, I left a handwritten card which read: “Words can’t describe what happened or how we are feeling. But one thing is for sure, we are in this together. We feel the same grief as you do.”
‘Last Wednesday as we walked through Albert Square, we may have looked a bit different, but as Renee said to me, wondering why everyone was staring at us: “We are just a man and woman walking to the town hall.”
‘We never expected those pictures to go round the world, but I really do hope people will look at them and see that two people from different faiths can come together in harmony and stand united.
‘Ours is just one example of the thousands of friendships and acts of kindness we don’t see.’